


Far From Home

by hangthestars



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, M/M, Past Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester, Slow Build Castiel/Dean Winchester, post-season 9
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:29:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangthestars/pseuds/hangthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel uses what's left of his power to cast a spell to save Dean Winchester's humanity. In the process, he rewrites reality, giving Dean a normal life -- one where he doesn't know that angels, monsters or Castiel himself even exist. In fact, the spell changes more than Cas bargained for, dropping him into a human life and surrounding him with familiar faces who are just as oblivious as Dean. On the downside, the old dangers are still out there... and Cas has left his friends with no memory of how to deal with them.</p><p> </p><p>Far From Home is a (mostly) canon compliant post-Season 9 fic. Characters, pairings and warnings will be updated as new chapters are posted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Flicker, Not A Flame

Castiel’s orders for Metatron are simple:

Ignore him.

 

Again, he’s a leader despite himself. His clock is ticking down, and while he doesn’t lie about it, he doesn’t discuss it with anyone if he can help it.

Heaven is every bit as beautiful as he remembers it — what little of it he can get to. His stolen grace is less a flame now than a flicker, and even a trip to a nearby human’s personal Heaven leaves him winded. He sends out angels to search for Dean Winchester’s soul instead of doing it himself.

When they find it, it certainly isn’t in Heaven.

 

Castiel continues the silence he’s imposed on Metatron when he drags him from the prison cell and teleports them to Naomi’s office. He practically throws him into the chair, clamping down the shackles while Metatron is still in shock.

Metatron pulls against his bonds and tries to sit up while Castiel stalks away, with no success. He means to say something that sounds important, that seizes power back even though he’s trapped, but Castiel isn’t even paying attention to him. Instead, the other angel is setting things out on the desk: a piece of paper with scribbled instructions, a vial of what looks like blood, a protea flower in a wooden bowl. To say that Castiel is _ragged_ is almost a compliment. He’s gaunt and withering, the dark circles under his eyes that much more prominent against his sallow skin.

“How’s your grace, Castiel?” His voice should be a needle in Castiel’s side, but it doesn’t even get him a nod. “You didn’t bring me here just to ignore me. What are you doing?”

When Castiel finally acknowledges him, he grunts and says, “You’re right.” Unstopping the vial, he dumps it over the red and orange petals of the flower and crushes it with his hand. He drops his angel blade into his other hand and approaches the chair.

Recognition flickers over Metatron’s expression. He squirms, again tugging against his bonds while Castiel draws closer. Once he’s in reach, Castiel pushes Metatron back down with his bloodied hand, putting pressure on his forehead. “Do you even know what this spell does?”

“Of course I do.” Castiel’s breath is labored. Even standing is an effort, and he’s spent enough power teleporting them that he’s winded.

“You’ll kill us both! Do your followers know that this is what your great _mercy_ looks like?”

“Shut. Up. This _is_ mercy.” For a second it seems as if he’ll impale Metatron, but he flips the blade in his shaking hand so he can draw it over his throat, just as Metatron had done to him less than a year before. “I’m letting you fix what you broke,” he adds as the grace slips from the vessel and into Castiel’s bloodied hand, making it glow.

“Castiel — Castiel, stop it,” Metatron orders, useless and lightheaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know how to control this.” The feeling of being so small and so empty so _quickly_ had put him in shock, enough so that he can’t appreciate the parallels.

Castiel begins to chant in Enochian, stopping once or twice to cough. By the time he reaches the end of the incantation, the glow from Metatron’s grace is nearly blinding, the magic pulling at him so hard that he expects his own grace to start bleeding through his skin. Instead, the spell finishes itself by ripping the stolen grace from his eyes and his mouth.

As it consumes them both, Castiel feels nothing. 

 

He wakes to asphalt making impressions on one side of his face and the sun beating down on the other. His head _aches_ , his limbs so heavy they almost don’t move when he tries. The smell of dirt, grass and (what he had to assume was) animal shit clogs up his nose. 

Somehow, he isn’t dead.

Castiel painstakingly pushes himself up on his hands, grunting when the rough pavement digs into his palms. The deja vu isn’t lost on him, but the last time he’d woken up on the ground without a shred of grace in him, it had been night and the ground had bit… softer. Once the grueling process of standing is finished, he squints against the sun to look around.

He’s in the middle of… somewhere, far enough from the beaten path that there’s nothing but road to be seen in either direction. The leaves are half green, half orange and yellow, the grass wet from recent rainfall. The thought of going anywhere puts a weight in his stomach; he can barely lift his feet to shuffle. 

Is this the consequence of the spell? To let him survive it so he can starve to death on the side of the road because he can’t drag himself to safety? It’s nothing less than he deserves. He’s either been laying there for months, or the spell had played with time as well as reality.

It it had even worked.

Dean. He has to find _Dean_.

Castiel feels the vibrations in the ground before he sees the eighteen-wheeler. His reaction is sluggish, and he stumbles out of the way at the last second. The horn blares as he tumbles to the ground and down the small slope next to the road, grunting in pain as he rolls and hits his back. It occurs to him when he settles that he has the option to stay here in the wet grass and just… take a nap…

“Hey. Hey, wake up, please don’t be dead—” 

He could have been out a second or an hour, but Castiel wakes to a worried voice. Its owner comes into focus while he squints up at her, taking in her dark shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, and… “ _Hannah_?"

“Oh thank God, you’re awake. Did you get clipped by that truck?” Hannah (is it Hannah? It has to be) gently runs her hands down his arms and carefully touches his sides, checking for wounds. She pulls back when he hisses in pain from a bruise. “I’m taking you to a hospital, but I need you to stay awake for me. If you fall asleep—you know what, I don’t actually remember what happened, but I know it’s bad.”

Despite his trying to help, lifting him is like carrying a sack of potatoes. They stumble out of the shallow divot and up to a car — a Mazda that’s seen dozens of better days —, where Hannah helps him into the passenger seat. She isn’t dressed like herself, he notes while she circles around the vehicle. Instead of her sweater vest and gray suit, she’s in an unzipped Yankees hoodie and a t-shirt over jeans. It’s almost unnervingly pedestrian, but he still finds comfort in the familiar face, even if he feels a little useless when she slides into the driver’s seat and reaches over him to buckle his seatbelt.

“Don’t need you tumbling forward into the dashboard, right?” When she turns on the car, she immediately dials down the radio, which blasts something with an electric guitar riff for that instant before it’s off. “I need you to stay awake,” she reiterates, keeping one hand on his shoulder while she pulls out onto the road. “Do you have a name?”

She doesn’t know him. Castiel takes a second for sorrow; he’d wanted so badly for his place to be with the Winchesters this past year, but he’d gotten used to Hannah. If this is her vessel, the angel herself must be safe in Heaven without a need for a human body. “Cas,” he says eventually. Even his _face_ feels tired, and he rests his head against the window with a clunk.

“Cas? Is that short for anything…?”

Castiel hears her but can’t answer. The words won’t reach his mouth intact, and what parts make it won’t articulate with his lazy tongue and his heavy jaw. In the semblance of comfort and the security of being strapped in to the seat, his newly human body is giving up on him. It isn’t long until he can’t keep his eyes open, lulled into contentment by the sound of the car’s tires against the asphalt despite not-Hannah’s efforts to keep his attention.

He passes out slumped against the door, his body heavy and his mind full of nothing.


	2. Valerie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cas sees what happened to Dean. Sort of. Featured song is Bad Company's "Valerie".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was NOT supposed to take four months, I swear. The next one shouldn't take nearly as long!
> 
> You can also find me on [tumblr](http://heartlighting.tumblr.com/), where I have a [fic-related tag](http://heartlighting.tumblr.com/tagged/far%20from%20home%20fic), where I'll post about fic updates and audio of any music involved in the story.

Not-Hannah turns out to be named Caroline Johnson.

Cas is shocked to find her in the waiting room at the hospital when he’s released. After his reluctant admission that he has nowhere to go (and no money to speak of), she foots his hospital bill and insists that he come home with her.

He quietly promises himself that he’ll start running if she proposes marriage.

 

 

He’s barely conscious for the first few days, and only realizes that he’s still alive because Caroline is there when he _is_ awake, plying him with food, trying to talk to him. He never knows what to say. Despite her patience, he always decides to excuse himself and go back to bed.

She’s given him the spare bed in her attic, which sits underneath a worn and unobtrusive wooden cross. The irony doesn’t matter as much as his overwhelming need for sleep. When the dreams come, all Cas remembers is one distinct, reoccurring image: the sight of trees and telephone poles passing by a car window. Everything around that is fuzzy and lost to the morning light when he wakes.

He should be looking for Dean, but as the ache in his bones and in his brain drags him back into troubled sleep, he convinces himself he isn’t ready to see what’s become of Dean Winchester just yet — if anything’s become of him at all.

 

 

Eventually, the need for rest gives way to restlessness. Cas drags himself out of bed one afternoon and, determined to stop moping, he hits the bathroom and heads downstairs.

He expects to hear Caroline moving around in the kitchen, or the sound of the living room TV. When there’s silence, he’s struck by unexpected disappointment, and realizes he started taking her constant presence for granted. That’s ridiculous, of course, he knows that she just happened to be around during the few times he woke, but the house’s emptiness still makes him uncomfortable.

Rather than the woman herself, he finds something she’s left behind in the kitchen: a stack of clothes (jeans, plastic-wrapped packets of gray t-shirts, socks and underwear) and a note that reads, “ _Picked these up for you while you were asleep. I’m at the Gas-N-Sip around the block if you have an emergency. Be back late. -Caroline_ ”. When Cas drops her note in the waste bin, he can see a number of other discarded notes on the same kind of paper.

He changes in the kitchen, leaving his dirty clothes hanging over a chair, and immediately heads out. Even if he has no idea where he is (and, as he steps outside, he realizes that he _doesn’t_ ), Cas knows what a Gas-N-Sip looks like, and he’s just been struck with the overwhelming craving for the smell of cheap gas station nachos and pizza. He hadn’t for a second enjoyed being homeless and lost, but his last human job had given him a purpose that he desperately misses it.

It’s not a long walk, and Cas realizes that he could have just cut through another person’s backyard instead of going all the way around if he’d wanted to. Caroline’s house is on the outskirts of a city, in an area where residences are crammed in next to mom-and-pop businesses that flirt with failure thanks to big box stores. The red-and-yellow gas station logo fills him with a heady nostalgia, and he almost runs the rest of the way once he catches sight of it.

Instead, he quietly lets himself in and takes a deep, appreciative breath as the scent of cheap food, coffee and gasoline fills his nose. Classic rock comes through the ceiling speakers, the coffee maker hums and sputters, the slushie machine grinds all the way in the back. Last time he was human, Cas learned that most people don’t think much of places like this. Even the name of this one is generic slang for any other gas station. He doesn’t care.

Caroline is behind the counter, scribbling on some forms while another employee sets hot dogs out on the rollers. The sound of the doorbell makes her look up, and she smiles in surprise. “Hey! There you are. Is everything all right? Do you need—”

“I’m okay,” he says, his tone gentle. “I needed the fresh air. And I wanted to speak with you about our… living situation.”

Caroline clicks her pen against the paper and takes a quick look around before giving him her full attention. “You sure you don’t want a little more time? I don’t mind giving you more.”

“I’m sure. You’ve already done more than I’d expect from a stranger—” Mm. That hurts to say, just a little. “—and I can’t keep taking advantage of your good will this way. I have things that I—”

Her attention is stolen by something out in the parking lot, and she holds up a hand. Apologetically, she says, “Hold that thought, okay? Let me take care of this customer.”

Cas isn’t ready for the overwhelming, punch-in-the-gut way he’d feel the next time he saw Dean Winchester’s face. While he’s busy forgetting how to breathe, Dean lets himself in and passes by to get to the counter. He looks exactly the way he should: work boots, faded jeans, jacket over flannel over a t-shirt, a couple days of scruff.

And not so much as a flicker of recognition when he spares Cas a glance. At first, it doesn’t even matter. He’s _alive_ , he’s breathing, he’s saying:

“Thirty on four and a pack of menthols. You finally put on some decent music in here. Thank God.” Dean taps his fingers along to a couple bars of Bad Company’s _Valerie_ while Caroline turns away to grab the smokes.

“Yeah, the usual station kept playing Katy Perry and Coldplay. Couldn’t take it anymore.” She clicks a couple buttons on the register, and Dean hands her a few beaten bills before she can ask if he wants anything else. Cas notes that it’s almost exact change. Not that he cares how Dean pays for his gas, but he remembers having regulars like that in Rexton. He must be here all the time.

“Told you so. —Thanks. See you around, Caroline.” Dean turns to go and finally notices Cas’s obvious staring. It stops him, but instead of what Cas has come to expect ( _Cas. Personal space._ ), Dean gives him a casual, crooked smile and adds, “You know, I usually make it to dinner before someone looks at me like that.” Then he winks and walks out like nothing happened.

In lieu of a comeback, Cas just watches him leave. Dean’s popping open the gas tank when Caroline interrupts his thoughts with an amused, “ _Wow_. Why didn’t you just lick his face while you were at it?”

Cas blinks and frowns, finally looking away from Dean. “What?”

She’s smiling, but he gets the distinct feeling she’s laughing at him. “You don’t want to mess with that one. He’s pretty, but he’s not worth it.”

The way Cas asks, “What do you mean?” is too aggressive for polite company. He immediately feels bad when her expression scrunches into annoyance, but she’s talking again before he can say he’s sorry. It’s clearly a misunderstanding; if she knew what she was talking about, she would never say that Dean Winchester _wasn’t worth it_.

“He’s kind of a rolling stone, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

She sighs. “He’s a player,” she says pointedly. “Never settles down. He owns the auto place about ten minutes from here.” She gestures in its general direction. “I’ve had so many friends see the inside of his bedroom _I_ could tell you what it looks like, and I’ve never touched him. And aside from that, he’s practically _made_ of baggage. You’ve got enough going on right now, anyway, so maybe boys should stay off the agenda…?”

Cas isn’t stupid. He knows when someone is trying to change the subject, but he’s in some place between jealousy and burning curiosity, and it’s hard for him to care that he sounds too intense when he insists on asking, “What do you mean, baggage? What kind of baggage?”

“You didn’t even speak to him, Cas, I think this is a little—”

“What. Baggage.”

Caroline holds her hands up in surrender, and she sighs again, this time in a _you asked for it_ way. “All right. Uh… well. Everyone who knows him is pretty sure he’s still in love with his baby mama. He’s a drunk. The only reason he’s not in lockup every weekend is because the local sheriff won’t arrest him. _His_ son is dating _her_ daughter or some other family thing, I mean, either way he’s a big boozer. He’s… ex-military. Parents are dead. The guy who gave him the scrapyard is dead, too. His brother’s been in a ward for a few years, no one knows what happened to him or if _he’s_ even still alive. He’s just trouble, Cas. Even if he _is_ equal opportunity trouble. Don’t mess with that kind of stuff just because you can. —Can we go back to what you wanted to talk about now? Yeah?”

Cas looks back out the window, and his heart sinks when he realizes that Dean is long gone. “…Yeah. I… wanted to talk about getting a job. Here. So I can start paying you back.”

Caroline nods approvingly. “Now _that_ , I can help you with.”

 

 

In some dingy motel room in Concordia, Kansas, the King of Hell is having some serious problems with his phone company. The sequences of events goes thusly:

Calling Moose. Phone out of service.

Calling Not Moose. Phone out of service.

One dead motel receptionist later, and the call is out:

“This is your king. Find the bloody Winchesters. —No, why would I want guns? _Sam_ and _Dean_ Winchester. First one to bring me a Winchester — _ALIVE_ — gets a promotion.”


End file.
